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E. V. Lucas

82 quotes

“In France he would have been, I think, a sad bore, for there he would have discovered so many points of superiority to the English: but not even so keen a censor of his own country and countrymen as Mr. Dabney could find aught in Venice, except such forgivable and inimitable advantages as crumbling and picturesque architecture and clear skies, to hold up as a model for home adoption.”
E. V. Lucas (1868–1938) said by 1938 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I never need to see any one twice to know them. My first impressions are always right. Sometimes I go back on my first impressions, but it is always a mistake to do so.”
E. V. Lucas (1868–1938) said by 1938 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Have misfortune and disease and frustration and insecurity been necessary to man's ingenuity and industry? Without sorrow should we have had no telegraph? without tears, no camera? Have all the benefits of civilisation been wrung from us in some effort to escape from the blows of fate? And even if so, might not happiness, without the advantages of progress, have still been better?”
E. V. Lucas (1868–1938) said by 1938 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He was born in 1770, in what he thought the best of all lands— Ireland; and he came home from the sea in 1802, but he did not take his pen in hand until 1836, during which time his memory had purged itself of inessentials. He wrote them not for the cold eye of a publisher's reader but (like a gentleman) for his own family's entertainment.”
E. V. Lucas (1868–1938) said by 1938 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I know nothing of grammar; At school they never could hammer Or beat it into my head. The bare word made me stammer, And turn pale as if I were dead. But here I may as well be telling, I'm often damned out in my spelling.”
E. V. Lucas (1868–1938) said by 1938 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I could go on indefinitely thus, calling forth from their graves these hard-bitten sea dogs; but that is enough. It is literature in its way, is it not? Are there the same or kindred characters in the Navy to-day, one wonders. Let us hope so.”
E. V. Lucas (1868–1938) said by 1938 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I wonder that affectionate parents can ever give their consent to their children's marriage at all. I can understand a father having no particular objection to his son's wife, and a mother to her daughter's husband; but how a father can ever even tolerate his daughter's husband or a mother the wife of her son, that is beyond my imagination.”
E. V. Lucas (1868–1938) said by 1938 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The world is a great leveller, and every year brings with it certain modifying influences. I like a man to be his age. Twenty-one is not an age I am very partial to: it is omniscient and exorbitant and cruel; but I like a youth of twenty-one none the less. Forty makes better company: when a man knows how little he knows, and how little life holds for him, and is yet unsubdued.”
E. V. Lucas (1868–1938) said by 1938 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She doesn't love you because of anything — she loves. She doesn't care whether you are handsome or ugly, or old or young, or cruel or kind, or strong or weak, or conceited or humble, whether you drop your h's, or have nothing in the bank — those things are beside the mark, because she loves.”
E. V. Lucas (1868–1938) said by 1938 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When it comes to analysing the pleasures of life, the privilege of approving and disapproving in conversation must be ranked very high, and reading aloud makes it so very harmless an amusement, since no talebearing is involved.”
E. V. Lucas (1868–1938) said by 1938 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What does matter is that in a French inn you may be as witty as you can, as intelligent as you can, but some one there will be more intelligent, more witty.”
E. V. Lucas (1868–1938) said by 1938 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To-day — well, my Utopia, if ever I framed one, would be a land where the laws demanded that people should be vicious. Then one would be able to count at any rate on a little virtue. If no man might live with a woman in any but an irregular union, there would be at once quite a run on honest matrimony and the Law Courts would be full of desperately wicked monogamists; while if every one was expected to steal and swindle, there would soon be an extensive criminal class who respected property.”
E. V. Lucas (1868–1938) said by 1938 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I walked back by way of the sea-lions' enclosure to refresh my eyes with the King Penguin's perfect ecclesiastical tailoring. He was pacing moodily about as usual, in what one felt to be the interval between a marriage ceremony and a funeral service. Much better, I thought, to have left the £2000 a year to him. No harm would then be done, and what perfect episcopal garden-parties he could give with it!”
E. V. Lucas (1868–1938) said by 1938 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What is it like in the air?" I once asked him. "Ripping," he said. "But the sensations?” I continued. “How do you feel?" "Ripping," he said. "And what does the world look like down below as you rush along?" "Ripping," he said.”
E. V. Lucas (1868–1938) said by 1938 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How can Nancy know her own mind when she has not got one? She is a dear, sweet girl, and I was devoted to her—am devoted to her—but she has no mind. It was I who was to give her that.”
E. V. Lucas (1868–1938) said by 1938 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Lotus-eating would give you a terrible stomachache," I said, "wouldn't it?" And the plucky little creature had the hardihood to reply, "I hope so." What can you do with people like this? and England is full of them. Suspicion of happiness is in our blood.”
E. V. Lucas (1868–1938) said by 1938 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is all to the good that insignificant-looking persons should do great things, but human nature will ever resent it. We are such determined idealists, we have such a passion for symmetry, that our first wish will always be that handsome does and handsome is shall be one.”
E. V. Lucas (1868–1938) said by 1938 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This is it: "There are two words for everything." Surely that is wisdom! The whole theory of party politics is in it, for one thing; and indeed all argument.”
E. V. Lucas (1868–1938) said by 1938 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The books that one reads in the impressionable years, and therefore absorbs and remembers, are always so much better and more exciting than life.”
E. V. Lucas (1868–1938) said by 1938 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I bade farewell to the May stars, and did one of the most adventurous things left to us — I went to bed. For no one can lay a hand on our dreams. All the authors of the world cannot spoil those.”
E. V. Lucas (1868–1938) said by 1938 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Fixed customs must be surrendered, lateness must become punctuality, cigarette ends must not burn the mantelpiece, one misses one's own China tea. The bathroom is too far and other people use it. There is no hook for the strop. In short, to be a really good guest and at ease under alien roofs it is necessary, I suspect, to have no home ties of one's own ; certainly to have no very tyrannical habits.”
E. V. Lucas (1868–1938) said by 1938 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have noticed that the people who are late are often so much jollier than the people who have to wait for them.”
E. V. Lucas (1868–1938) said by 1938 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Suzanne could not read a word, but the last atom of flavour was conserved in every dish that she sent to table; and what is literature compared with cooking? One is shadow and the other is substance.”
E. V. Lucas (1868–1938) said by 1938 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The truth is the only thing worth having, and, in a civilized life, like ours, where so many risks are removed, facing it is almost the only courageous thing left to do.”
E. V. Lucas (1868–1938) said by 1938 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The trouble is that really wanting things is so rare. It's a lukewarm world!”
E. V. Lucas (1868–1938) said by 1938 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Human nature is rarely so amusing as when trying to get a house off its hands. Women at this task can be untruthful enough, but their untruth lacks the infusion of candour which a skilful male liar can introduce.”
E. V. Lucas (1868–1938) said by 1938 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People in hotels strike no roots. The French phrase for chronic hotel guests even says so: they are called dwellers sur la branche.”
E. V. Lucas (1868–1938) said by 1938 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is possible to give wedding presents, birthday presents, and Christmas presents without any thought or affection at all: they can be ordered by post card; but the unbirthday present demands the nicest care. It is therefore the best of all, and it is the only kind to which the golden rule of present-giving imperatively applies — the golden rule which insists that you must never give to another anything that you would not rather keep for ourself, nothing that does not cost you a pang to part from.”
E. V. Lucas (1868–1938) said by 1938 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I should have remembered that black is the colour of France. Amusing that the typical figure of that country in so many people's imagination is a saucy girl with little or nothing on, whereas in reality it is an old woman in mourning.”
E. V. Lucas (1868–1938) said by 1938 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The French never allow a distinguished son of France to lack a statue.”
E. V. Lucas (1868–1938) said by 1938 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The man who is so painstakingly cautious about doing his own body no harm seldom does anything for anyone else.”
E. V. Lucas (1868–1938) said by 1938 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I asked him how he kept his temper when customers were unreasonable. "Oh, that's all in the day's work," he said. "I know they don't mean it. It's not the gentlemen who are snappish, it's their empty stomachs...." "It is not the gentlemen," he went on, "that break a waiter's heart; it's the kitchen. That's where our trouble is. It's cooks that ruin eating-houses. A cook who has a grudge against a head-waiter can cost his governor pounds and pounds a day. It's all in his hands; he can spoil things, or he can keep them back till the customers bang out in a fury.... Gentlemen who blame waiters for being slow don't remember that the food has got to be cooked and served up, and that the waiter doesn't do either. "But there;" Mr. Duckie said, "an empty stomach can't remember everything. I often think this would be a better-tempered and happier world if we ate a little all the time instead of saving up our appetites for real meals. But speaking as a waiter, I can see it's best as it is.”
E. V. Lucas (1868–1938) said by 1938 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source